Government Invents Term “Tax Defier” in Orwellian Gambit

The U.S. Department
of Justice [sic] today
announced the rollout of what it calls the
“National Tax Defier Initiative” (“or TAXDEF,” the
press release notes, to feed the acronym-hungry public).

The purpose of this initiative is to reaffirm and reinvigorate the Tax
Division’s commitment to investigate, pursue and, where appropriate,
prosecute those who take concrete action to defy and deny the fundamental
validity of the tax laws.

Millions of hard-working Americans take time out of their hectic schedules
to perform a time-consuming and often arduous task of filing federal income
tax returns. 130 million Americans voluntarily engage in this ritual every
year. These individuals participate because they know that with the
privileges that the United States has given them come the responsibilities
and obligations of citizenship.…

There’s that word “voluntarily”
again. No wonder the tax protesters get
confused
when the government itself keeps using this word in misleading ways. Anyway…

This initiative is aimed at stopping those tax defiers who do not meet their
federal tax obligations and seek to transfer those obligations to their
neighbor’s back. The tax defier is not someone who has a legitimate or
factual dispute about the amount of tax due. The tax defier is not someone
who is merely exercising his or her First Amendment rights to challenge the
tax policy choices that Congress has made. Instead, the tax defier is
someone who rejects the legal foundation of the tax system, despite decades
of legal precedent upholding the system’s constitutional and statutory
validity, and who takes specific and concrete action to violate the law. It
is this tax defier conduct, which results in fraudulent claims, frivolous
returns and bogus schemes, that threatens the foundation of our tax system
and must be vigorously countered. This activity not only wastes limited
governmental investigative, administrative and judicial resources, but it
also fundamentally undermines the public’s confidence in the fairness
of the tax system.

So what does this mean in concrete terms? It sounds to me like more of the
usual. The bullet points describing the actual components of this exciting new
initiative were all things like “strengthen and expand coordination…”,
“leverage expertise and resources…”, “expand our efforts…”, “maximize our use
of technology…” and “alert and educate the public…”. In other words, a lot of
vague hand waving about bigger, better, faster, more.

So it probably just amounts to the government’s annual tax season
puffing-up-of-the-chest so as to let everybody know that the
IRS
isn’t just a paper tiger.

One interesting thing about the new initiative is its new terminology. The
Justice Department used to refer to the tax protesters it prosecuted either as
“tax protesters” or
as “tax resisters”.
Last month, they started to use “tax defiers” instead.

At first, when I heard about this, I was worried that they were going to start
pulling tax resisters into the dragnet — that maybe the government had
invented this new term to serve as an umbrella term for what has been
more-or-less successfully differentiated as
tax protesters and tax resisters, for instance on Wikipedia.

But I don’t see much evidence of this from today’s announcements. The two
enforcement actions the government has used to roll out their new terminology
were both examples of the Constitutionalist tax protest school. And organized
tax resisters, with few exceptions, don’t tend to “reject the legal foundation
of the tax system.”

Reason magazine’s cover story this month is all about the huge financial cost of the United States’ wars, and how the government is using unprecedented accounting chicanery to hide the cost from the taxpayers who will be paying it.

At Dogpatch, Ergo Sum, Gerald DePyper has been posting aseriesof articles promoting a tax strike in the anti-abortion movement.

An audit of the IRS by TIGTAfound that the agency doesn’t always follow its own rules for notifiying people that liens have been filed against them.

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